Month: September 2014

Sphere Fluidics has featured in an article entitled “Tax relief gives angels extra incentive” on page 43 of the Business Section of today’s London Times. Dr Frank F. Craig (CEO) was interviewed and discussed that Sphere Fluidics has had great success in raising around £3 million in angel funding – all of which was compatible with the UK Government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). He also stated that “If you are (raising) under £2 million, a lot of small companies have to rely on angels and investors and EIS has stimuated that”. An on-line version is also available here.

Dr Frank F. Craig (CEO of Sphere Fluidics) will be attending a Microbiology and Infectious Disease Congress in London during September 29th-30th 2014. “Sphere Fluidics has developed a brand new “Patho-Mine” technique for screening billions of bacteria in a novel biochip in a single day. This approach can be used to identfy new therapeutic targets and identify modes of anti-microbial resistance (mutations can occur at very low rates down to one in a billion). We are attending the conference to meet with the scientific leaders in this area and learn more about the emerging trends and technology needs.” he said. Conference information can be found here.

Dr. Marian Rehak (R&D Director, Sphere Fluidics Limited) said “After an exacting selection process, Sphere Fluidics has selected Cambridge Consultants Limited as our partner in product engineering for Cyto-Mine (a novel single cell analysis instrument). They are a world-class technology consultancy business with expertise in microfluidics, optoelectronics and picodroplet areas – critical for success”. Dr Frank F. Craig (CEO) said “This will be a revolutionary product for the Biopharmaceutical Discovery and Development market. The commercial potential is also visible in synthetic biology, antibiotic-resistance screening and single cell diagnostics – so this will be a huge, global seller!”. “We are pleased to be working with Sphere Fluidics,” said John Pritchard, Head of Diagnostics at Cambridge Consultants. “Our track record of engineering excellence makes Cambridge Consultants the development partner of choice for clients ranging from small, ambitious start-ups right the way through to multinational, blue-chip organisations”.

Sphere Fluidics has been awarded a US patent on separation of picodroplets using novel microfluidic designs. “This brings our patent portfolio to 52 patents with 11 families and 22 granted international patents” said Dr Marian Rehak (Director of R&D). “Our patent portfolio and associated Freedom-To-Operate is an amazing asset” said Dr Rob Marchmont (Commercial Director). “This patent collection underpins development and protects our new Cyto-Mine single cell analysis platform and our other emerging mass spectrometry platform (ESI-Mine). It is also available for licensing to approved external organisations”.

Work carried out by Dr David Holmes (a Principal Engineer as Sphere Fluidics) in collaboration with colleagues from Imperial College, University College London and University of Edinburgh will be presented in two papers at the 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference – MNF2014, to be held in London from the 7th-10th September 2014. The first paper, “Multiphase measurement of blood flow in a microchannel. J. Sherwood, D. Holmes, E. Kaliviotis and S. Balabani” presents an experimental study of blood flow dynamics in microfluidic channels and builds on work published recently by the same authors in the journal PLOSONE. The second, “Deformability of red blood cells affects their velocity in deterministic lateral displacement devices. T. Krueger, D. Holmes and P. Coveney” presents a numerical modelling (Lattice-Boltzmann) study of how deformable objects, such as blood cells, behave while flowing through complex microfluidic geometries. Further details of MNF2014 can be found here.